As a stroke of marketing genius, Julius Onah's The Cloverfield Paradox was released just hours after its first (and only) trailer dropped at Super Bowl LII. However, is the third movie in the series nothing more than a happy accident?

It turns out the use of the word "Cloverfield" in the movie's title may have been a freak accident, with Onah having already started filming Paradox before it evolved into a Cloverfield movie.

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Speaking in a Facebook Q&A, producer JJ Abrams revealed the surprising titbit that will undoubtedly completely change our view of the movie.

"Bad Robot (JJ's production company) got a hold of the script and we started to think, 'What are ways that this might fit into the world?'" said Abrams. "But when we started shooting the movie, it was still something we were thinking about.

"Because the idea for the Cloverfield series was, like I said earlier, not so much that it be this narrative throughline, but more that they be these really fun sort of thrill rides. Like, if you imagine an amusement park, that's a Cloverfield amusement park, and every ride has a different purpose, but they all kind of connect in some way or another."

He continued that there was a particularly fluid method to the way Paradox was shot — basically, it sounds like they didn't know what they were doing.

"It was a while we were shooting that we were making adjustments. This was a movie that went through many sort of different iterations as we went along.

"There are some studios that do that as a practice, and we really hadn't before... literally the idea of expanding the story of Gugu's husband Rogers' character literally came because people were saying, 'We want to see more.' So we started to explore that. And we ended up writing and shooting that sequence too."

The relatively last-minute inclusion of the Paradox into the world of Cloverfield may at least explain some of the movie's disjointed problems.

There is no doubting it was a sci-fi spectacular, but the ideas of The Cloverfield Paradox did feel a little thrown together for the addition of a giant monster in the last 30 seconds.

However, with Abrams still powering ahead with a fourth movie (Overlord) and rumours of Daisy Ridley having already filmed a secret fifth instalment, the expanded universe may only just be getting started.

Where Cloverfield is heading next remains as confusing as some of the movies themselves. We have gone from found-footage creature feature to apocalyptic bunker horror, spaceship slaughterer to zombie crawler, so what's left?

Either way, Paramount promises that Overlord will be coming to cinemas. With the controversy surrounding The Cloverfield Paradox, this could turn out to be the final nail in the coffin for the franchise, but who knows?